Brecht, back in industrial Germany,
after a trip to the countryside,
gazed through the sooty air
at the grubby rows of houses
and said, smiling -
"What a beautiful landscape".
In the North of England, too, such sights
were common but few saw beauty
until one lonely rent collector
looked with a painter's eye.
His name was Lowry and when asked
"how beauty? why lonely?" replied -
"Had I not been lonely I would
never have seen what I saw".
What he saw, thinking and watching,
one November afternoon,
were the usual cotton workers
swarming out through the gates
of the Eden Spinning Mill in Salford.
Hunched, shivering under the gritty rain,
they hurried between dark terraces,
watched by factory chimneys smoking,
probing the grim, sooty sky.
And Lowry? He was filled with rapture.
In other paintings, doorways are shut,
curtains hang at windows,
like upper halves of people watching,
short-trousered children fighting,
passersby loitering, curious.
Were they, too, lonely, all the people?
Each tiny person alive and different.
Small loneliness on the old Oldham Road.
True, he made enough sad paintings,
a derelict manor marooned on an island,
broken, desolate telegraph poles and lines,
the faint grey steeples of ageing churches.
But there is humour: a man on a wall,
horizontal, smoking like the factories,
cigarette at a cheerful angle, pointing.
And Lowry's initials mark the briefcase
propped at the foot of the wall.
A common flatline bars many paintings
but this is Lowry, happy alone for the time.
I am on top he is saying. No down lines
for the present, though the verticals are there.
He makes his lone time
his own time.
©Terry Hodgson2025
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